Marlborough Mound, Silbury Hill, and Avebury Henge

Here's a recent article from the Stone PagesArchaeo News describing new results of a radiocarbon dating test conducted on the Marlborough Mound, located in England to the west of London and to the north of Stonehenge. For the first time, such tests have confirmed a very ancient date for the mound -- 2400 BC according to this dating.

The Marlborough Mound is located just to the east of the famous Silbury Hill (shown above), the largest such mound in all of Europe. It is 130 feet high and required an immense amount of technical and physical skill to construct. The base and truncated top were very precise circles, as are the some of the surrounding stone circles which were almost certainly connected in their overall purpose.

While the academic community remains at odds about the purpose of the extensive ancient construction in the area, Martin Doutréhas outlined the plausible theory that the entire complex (including the enormous stone circle at Avebury to the southwest of Silbury Hill) functioned as an "open-air university" for the training of initiates in the mathematics and knowledge required for bluewater ocean navigation.

In a series of webpages beginning here, Mr. Doutré describes the significance of the precise measurements and angles present at Avebury Henge, showing that they are directly related to the size of the spherical earth and to a sophisticated of calendar cycles relating to the orbit of the earth around the sun and of the moon around the earth. He also shows that the dimensions and angles of many of these monuments may well be related to those of the pyramids of Giza -- a startling possibility which we have discussed previously with respect to Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid in this post.

After providing close examination of the circles and angles at Avebury, Mr. Doutré says:

The reader-researcher will begin to appreciate the mammoth effort expended by ancient British society to put such an array of structures in place, but will also begin to understand why it was done. One has to remember that at a time when there was no great availability of paper to make text-books of instruction, lessons had to be taught and learnt by grueling rote and repetition, coupled with hands on experience. There was no other avenue available to ancient tutors, but to set out structures across the landscape and commit to memory the refined scientific information incorporated into each position. A purpose-placed stone or marker-mound represented a mnemonic device or memory trigger repository of coded information, but the real knowledge reposed in the mind of the master. (Fourth page in the series, here).

He then puts forward the fascinating possibility that the long double rows of standing stones along present-day West Kennet Avenue (extending south from the Avebury Circle) functioned as a kind of "practice lane" for navigators-in-training to learn their important distances, angles, and navigational concepts. This is personally very plausible to me as a former Infantry officer in the US Army, where we spent plenty of time walking just such practice lanes on the "land nav" courses in the wilderness around Fort Benning, Georgia and other Infantry training sites.

We have already seen extensive evidence that ancient mankind crossed the oceans long before conventional history says it was possible (see this post, for example). Doing so deliberately and successfully is not easy, and so it is perfectly logical that training in advanced concepts of geodesy (the measurement of the size of the spherical earth), astronomy, and navigation must have taken place. As Mr. Doutré points out, "For mariner-navigators especially, the lessons had to be learnt very thoroughly, as the open sea did not abide fools well or forgive them for their ignorance."

Finally, Mr. Doutré discusses Silbury Hill in the ninth webpage of the series, and posits that its size and location enabled observers to view the progress of the students in this complex and enormous outdoor training ground. He then turns his attention to the still-visible remains of three modern "crop-circle" designs located within sight of Silbury Hill. The results of his analysis of the angles and distances from Silbury Hill to the centers of these crop circles are quite remarkable, in that they appear to contain important numerical codes that are certainly not well-known to the general public.

In fact, among other things, the important precessional numbers 108 and 25,920 both appear to be present in these crop circles! That's fairly unexpected.

Whatever the origin of the mysterious crop circles, it is fairly clear that the extensive Avebury - Silbury complex encodes and preserves sophisticated mathematical, astronomical, geodetic, and possibly navigational concepts. The results of continued testing demonstrate that the site has guarded these concepts for well over four thousand years -- and possibly even longer than that. The entire area is an important clue to mankind's ancient past, and powerful evidence that there is far more to the story than conventional theories will currently admit.